Concorde Solutions has become the latest company to join the Cloud Industry Forum, the not-for-profit organisation founded in 2009 to promote trust, security and transparency within the cloud sector by championing best practice and certification among Cloud Service Providers.
Concorde Solutions, the creator of Software Value Management solutions, is the latest in a number of key cloud solution vendors becoming members of the industry body which advocates end user adoption and driving best practice in the delivery of cloud services. Specialists over many years in the market about matters ranging from Software Asset Management and Licensing to Anti-Piracy, Concorde leads in the field of helping organisations understand how best to drive value from their purchase and use of software regardless of their deployment model, including the complexities of cloud services.
Martin Prendergast, CEO, Concorde Solutions, stated: “What we refer to as Software Value Management (SVM) is high on the agenda of the cost-conscious CxO. Many organisations are poorly equipped to deal with the challenges of software licensing in simple environments, let alone with complex virtualised or cloud models. This makes the challenge of unlocking the vast opportunity it represents a daunting task. Confusing market messages also leads to the fear of deploying the wrong solution. In turn this leads to a low ROI, or worse a fear of failure, leaving achievable savings sitting on the table for many organisations.
One of the biggest challenges faced by enterprise companies today is the management of their software license estate not just to ensure against non-compliance, but to proactively drive best value in procurement and reuse. By necessity, companies endeavour to demonstrate ethical and efficient working practices but increasingly pressure from the biggest and most strategically important software vendors, who want to be correctly paid, is causing software compliancy to become a critical business issue. Added to this is the perception that the Cloud is compounding the problem, which is why we have joined the Cloud Industry Forum to drive this agenda and help in educating the end user that it is possible to gain control over costs, governance and compliance for all software no matter how it’s delivered,” Prendergast added.
“The relevance of the hybrid IT environment, combining on-premise IT with hosted or cloud services, is one that sits well for most organisations in principle. Further, the number of cloud service providers is expanding rapidly, and major ISVs are creating new licensing models or even adjusting existing ones to provide additional licensing flexibility. Given these progressive developments, end users are looking to the industry to assist and educate them when it comes to managing software assets across their full lifecycle, regardless of the distributed environment,” said Andy Burton, Chair of the Cloud Industry Forum and Chief Executive of Fasthosts.
“There is no doubt that with the advent of the Cloud many organisations may be thinking the complexities of software licensing are over and value can be more easily measured. Far from it: licenses still exist and the challenge for many compliance officers and IT or procurement departments remains how to manage the full estate of software assets to drive best value,” he continued. “Concorde Solutions is therefore a very welcome new member to the Forum, one that will help us not only educate end users about the challenges of licensing and the cloud, but also help us as a members’ body, define the issue from a CSPs perspective.”